IT’S official. Sir Keir Starmer’s record on stopping the small boats is now the worst of any prime minister since the illegal immigration crisis began seven years ago.
Just look at the latest numbers, which make a total mockery of our country’s claim to be a sovereign, independent nation which has taken back control. Since the beginning of this year alone, astonishingly, some 6,642 illegal migrants have entered Britain on 119 small boats. That’s up 40 per cent on the number at the same point last year. This crisis, in other words, is getting worse, not better.
And look at the longer trend.
Since Starmer and Labour came to power last July, promising to ‘smash the gangs’ smuggling migrants into Britain, nearly 30,000 illegal migrants have arrived on some 542 small boats. That’s an average of 780 migrants every week under Starmer, compared with 570 under Rishi Sunak and 400 under Boris Johnson, and it takes the total number of arrivals since the crisis began in 2018 to 157,780 on 4,408 boats.
More people have now entered Britain illegally on the small boats, as I’ve pointed out before, than are in the British Army.
It’s a shocking fact, isn’t it?
And the number looks set to soar even higher unless we urgently and radically change direction. According to one think-tank, another 60,000 could arrive this year.
Not that you’ll hear about any of this from Starmer, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, or members of our utterly incompetent Labour government. In recent days, they’ve remained in some kind of fantasy land, continuing to gaslight the hardworking, taxpaying, law-abiding British people by claiming they’re getting on top of the small boats crisis when, in reality, they’re doing no such thing. Only this week, for example, Labour announced a raft of new measures.
At yet another pointless international summit in London – this time attended by ministers, law enforcement and social media representatives from some 40 countries – Starmer declared to the world that he is ‘angry’ about illegal migration and that, for too long, Britain has been ‘a soft touch’ on the issue. Countries around the world, he said, would now be sharing intelligence, resources and tactics – leaving one to wonder what on earth they’ve been doing until now.
Social media firms, he went on, have been told to take down TikTok videos that illegal migrants share on their journey across the Channel to advertise and mock the fact that our national borders have become a total joke and disgrace, as if removing a few online videos might discourage some of the estimated 117million displaced persons around the world from seeking a more secure and better life in Europe.
Labour’s Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, then announced that she has found another £33million of taxpayers’ money to throw at the spiralling crisis, which will be spent on ‘high impact operations’ to ‘tackle supply chains, illicit finances and trafficking routes’ and prosecute people-smugglers.
On top of all that, Sir Keir Starmer, with a straight face, announced that since coming to office his Labour government has already returned some ‘24,000 people who have no right to be here’.
Sorry, but do Starmer, Cooper, and the Labour government think we are idiots? Do they think we will fall for this? Because while they might think this will work in that other galaxy they appear to be living in, back here in reality it’s obvious to everybody it will do no such thing.
As I first argued in May 2023, before Labour even came to power and before the number of illegal migrants continued to explode, focusing only on ‘smashing the gangs’ will never work because it’s the equivalent of Whack-A-Mole: once you get rid of one gang, another just pops up to fill its place.
This is why the numbers will keep going up and up no matter how many people smugglers you throw in prison, no matter how many boats you capture, no matter how many people you put under surveillance, no matter how many TikTok videos you take down.
Furthermore, the idea that Labour is suddenly returning record numbers of illegal migrants is also for the birds. In reality, what Labour are not telling you is they are approving the vast majority of claims for asylum that are being made by illegal migrants. This, in turn, is sending an enormous signal to other would-be illegal migrants around the world to come to Britain, knowing their chance of staying is very high.
Even BBC Verify pointed out that Starmer’s claims make absolutely no sense, although predictably they fell short of saying what he is actually doing: lying to the people.
While in fantasy land Starmer is talking about a ‘record return’ of some 24,000 people, in reality only 6,339 of these are ‘enforced returns’. Most of the people who have left Britain have been ‘voluntary returns’ while many have left without the Labour government being involved at all.
Look at the second half of last year. More than 23,000 people entered Britain illegally on the small boats but only 1,053 of them, or 4.5 per cent of the total, were removed and returned. This is absurd.
And it speaks to a much deeper and more profound point that I think is on the minds of millions of Brits in this country. The small boats crisis is not just breaking our laws, the British people’s sense of fairness, and making a mockery of our claim to be a sovereign nation that has regained control of its borders. In the eyes of millions of Brits, the small boats crisis has also become a powerful symbol of the much wider failure of the state to manage mass immigration, integration, and multiculturalism.
It’s not just the small boats, is it? It’s the fact that one million people in this country cannot even speak English, or the fact that nearly one in four primary school children in England do not speak English as their main language.
It’s the fact that nearly half of all social housing in our capital city has gone to people who were not born in the UK, or the fact, as I’ve repeatedly shown in this newsletter, that there are many areas in England where most social housing has gone to foreigners who often do not work, do not speak English, and do not choose to identify with a British or English identity.
It’s the fact that more British Muslims left this country to join extremist Islamist death-cults overseas than are serving in the British army, or the fact there are currently 85 sharia courts operating in Britain.
It’s the fact that when they were recently asked how they identify ‘first and foremost’, 71 per cent of British Muslims said ‘as a Muslim’ while only 27 per cent said ‘as British/English’
It’s the fact that one in every 50 people in this country arrived only in the last two years, or the fact that nearly 90 per cent of all immigration into Britain is from outside Europe, often from radically different if not incompatible cultures.
It’s the fact that mainstream businesses in this country such as Five Guys in Birmingham are now banning pork and alcohol https://www.gbnews.com/news/five-guys-pork-alcohol-halal-restaurant-birmingham-islam-muslim or that we now have candidates at national and local elections running on explicitly sectarian lines, more concerned about Gaza than Britain.
It’s this glaring failure of the state, this shocking incompetence to manage the dire effects of mass immigration that is dividing our nation, eroding public trust in the system, and laying a foundation for a very uncertain and unpredictable future.
If our leaders were serious about fixing all this, if they were serious about prioritising the safety, security, and rights of the British people then they would, as I’ve consistently argued, make these key changes:
They’d leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which is being used by an assortment of illegal migrants and foreign criminals to avoid deportation.
They’d reform if not repeal Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act (HRA), which entrenches the ECHR into domestic UK law.
And they’d dramatically reduce the amount of welfare that we currently offer to asylum-seekers and refugees, which has also led our European partners to complain that we are providing more incentives than deterrents.
This is what’s needed to fundamentally deal with this crisis. This is what’s needed to fix our borders and restore public trust.
This is what’s needed to prioritise the British people over those who break our laws. And this is what’s needed so that we can leave Labour’s fantasy land and get back to reality.
This article was first published on Matt Goodwin’s substack and republished by kind permission
